


A Quiet Night in Paradise

by miss_nettles_wife



Category: Eerie Indiana: The Other Dimension
Genre: Canon Typical Weirdness, Death, M/M, Mentioned Character Death, Orignal Characters - Freeform, back ground weirdness, death of a main character but not really, morgues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 13:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12984921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_nettles_wife/pseuds/miss_nettles_wife
Summary: Doctor Mitchell Taylor had not been expecting Detective Hepburn to be bringing him a body this late.





	A Quiet Night in Paradise

**Author's Note:**

> Helena Hepburn - TOD's Melanie Monroe  
> Jamie Donovan - TOD's Janet Donner 
> 
> and in other news Rodney/Mitchell is my TOD OTP who would have guessed. To see some expansion on my reasoning for Mitch as a medical examiner over a weirdness investigator, see the end of the fic.

There is something about morgues that always seem dreary, even in a better lit and better ventilated one. Something about the clinical nature of the place, with scratched steel tables, the cool air, and the knowledge of decay.

In this particular morgue half of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs are blown, and there is no money in the budget to fix them. The half where the bulbs are dead is directly over Mitchell’s desk, and he relies on the light of his tiny television and one ancient lamp to do his paperwork. He’s trying to conserve the ones he has left by leaving them off as much as he can. It lends an unfortunately spooky aura to the room, but it doesn’t bother him especially.

He sent his assistant home hours ago, fully intending to spend the night tending to his neglected paperwork, such was the perils of working in a town with an unusually high mortality rate. In the last week alone, there’d been two suspected sacrifices, half a dozen skulls turned up on the edge of town, and one plain old fashioned homicide. Nice.

But for tonight, the corpses were locked in their drawers (which were padlocked to prevent escape), and the skulls were sitting in a cardboard box on the edge of his desk. 

Being a pathologist in Eerie was a lot of work, it was like walking a tightrope, is this weird, or just humans being dicks? If this is weird, how do I cover it? He used to be mad about that sort of thing, but he’s not any more. It’s for the good of the town; and what good would the truth do the dead? They were dead already. If people are too stupid to notice what’s in front of them, well, it’s not his problem.

Mitchells desk was perpetually messy. It was littered with papers, donation receipts in Stanley’s name, folders, unfiled pictures, pictures of crime scenes, and his own various mementos. Or, if you were Jenny Donovan, plastic tat. Toys he’d rescued from charity stores (he wasn’t fussy, there was a nice mix of metal cars, trolls with techicolour hair, dolls with no articulation and pocket monsters, for which he had a particular fondness), pictures of his family, a roll of photo booth pictures he took with Stanley, a half eaten box of tic tacs, and more water bottles than probably any reasonable person should own. There was weird stuff too, a whole drawer stuffed full of it. A watch that only read 66:66, a ring that magically tightened to the finger of the owner, a doll that when you pressed it’s stomach played your last minute of life to you (His has changed many times), trading cards that when held made you incredibly driven to collect them all, a broach that burned the hand of whoever was holding if it they lied, and a few other knick nacks he deigned to keep.

He lost track of the time as he carefully wrote out his findings on the skulls for detective Hepburn. Before the night was through, he got a phone call. Mitchell has the volume on the ringer as loud as it can be, and it startled him. The station he’d been playing, Eerie Twenty Three (mostly infomercials) had gone to station close, and was blasting elevator music. He flipped it off, and grabbed the phone.  
“Dr Taylor, Eerie Morgue.”  
“It’s me.”  
“Detective Hepburn.”  
“Listen, I know it’s late but there’s a body coming in.”  
“At ten o’clock at night?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Well, I’m here. Do you need me to come and look at the crime scene?”  
“It’s not a crime scene, death by exposure.”  
“Are you certain?”  
“Yeah, I had your assistant look, he’s sending you the body now.”  
“Alright.”  
“He wants to know if he should come in.”  
“Tell him go home and rest, I’ll prepare the body and we can do the autopsy tomorrow.”  
“Right oh, then. See you when I get there.”

Dead air.

Mitchell put his phone down, and looked up, eyes running along one of his shelves. He accidentally made eye contact with the skull sitting on the end, who as per usual, telepathically told him exactly how she felt about being neglected on the shelf.

 “ _Mitchell you said you were going to work on my case two weeks ago and you haven’t even taken out the file!”_

As per usual, Mitchell picked her up, and turned her away, annoyed. He was a busy man, a long dead woman with no family wasn’t exactly high on his priority list, even if she could talk. Instead, he prepped the room for the arrival of a body. It’s kinda weird to have two desks in the morgue, but everything in Eerie was weird, and there was no money for him so he dealt with it.

It didn’t take too long for the body and Agent Hepburn to arrive. What surprised him was her attire. She was wearing a floor length dress with a low cut neckline. About three inches of scar tissue from her transplant was visible above the neckline on the dress. She was wearing lipstick too, electric blue. Usually, if asked to describe the style of his workmate Mitchell would have gone with tom boy-ish and kind of bland. She was dressing up, a new date? Interesting, but not really any of his business.

“Doctor Taylor.”  
“Detective.” They both look down to the body. Mitchell’s stomach rolls. A kid, he’s just a kid. Sixteen, maybe seventeen.  
“Found him by dumpsters behind the World O’ Stuff.”  
“Crawford found him?”  
“Yes, claims he wasn’t there earlier.”  
“He’s probably right. You know as well as I do reality and The World O’ Stuff don’t mesh.”  
“Truth.” She said. “What do you make of him?” Mitchell looked down. He was the same age Stanley was when he…Took a one way trip out of Weirdsville. Grey hair, weird but not too unusual. It was a trend, or so he’d been told. He looks innocent. On the back of each hand is a tattoo. A plus, and a minus. Also not exactly unusual. Kids get tattoos all the time; especially one without a guardian. Black over coat, odd for the warm weather; but again: Not incredibly unusual.

“I’m going to scrub up and clean the body. You should go back to your date.” Helena made a dismissive gesture.  
“No offense, Mitchell, but seeing a dead kid puts a real damper on a hot date.” As a pathologist, he couldn’t relate. He saw dead kids all the time. And dead adults. And animals. It was just life. He also couldn’t relate to the date stuff, he hasn’t been on a date in over a year and hasn’t done the dirty in longer. Not since Rodney was last in town, anyway. He missed Rodney a lot, but it was better for them to be split up. Rodney couldn’t settle down, and he couldn’t move away.  They were incompatible, and some day his heart was going to accept it.

“Well, you can help me. Scrub up.” They both left, and went to pull on scrubs. Naturally. Mitchell passed the mirror on his way back into the room. He paused, and put his hand over the fucked up part of his chin; it didn’t help. Hm. He walked back in, and speak of the devil, his phone buzzed twice. Since he wasn’t gloved yet, he grabbed it and took a quick look. Rodney, asking if he was still in Eerie, and if he wanted to have dinner; something weird was happening. Mitchell thought that was unusual, but he sent back a sure anyway.

The process was long, but Mitchell moved on muscle memory until the boy was lying still and clean under a white blanket, pulled up to preserve whatever dignities the dead are afforded. Helena went through his coat, and then called out.  
 “Mitch!” He walked over, and took the card from her. His name is scrawled across the top in farmilliar handwriting. It seems to be a business card, with the solar system printed on it. Mars is circled.

He hadn’t exactly kept in contact with Marshall;  any of them. It was a bit hard when you’re in different dimensions. But Mitchell knew his handiwork when he saw it. Bastard. Couldn’t he just accept that Mitchell wasn’t like him and wasn’t interested in persuing weirdness as a hobby?  
“This mean something to you?”  
“Just that things are about to get weirder.” He replied. No sooner had the words left his mouth than a scream came from the operating table.

 They both turned to see the dead kid was sitting up clutching the sheet to his chest. 

**Author's Note:**

> to put it briefly, Marylin and Edgar are very supportive parents, Mary Anne and Edward never give me that impression. Aside from both being doctors and supposedly the smarted people in Eerie; of course.  
> Im convinced they'd force Mitchell into uni and in their footsteps if he wanted it or not, while I'm inclined to believe Marylin and Edgar would let Marshall make his own career choices.


End file.
